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Today's date is Thursday, March 28, 2024
School of Social Sciences
 October 2019
Thursday 24
12:00 - SEMINAR - Pleistocene archaeological sites in developing countries across Asia: Research and management More Information
Abstract

There are a number of challenges that face the cultural heritage management of prehistoric sites dating back to the Pleistocene. Conservation, which includes research, and protection of such sites, requires approaches that are uniquely applicable to this context. Discussion will revolve around four Pleistocene sites across Asia: the fossil hominin sites of Dmanisi, Georgia, and Sangiran, Java, Indonesia, and two further sites in the Philippines, Rizal, Kalinga Province, and Callao, Peñablanca, Cagayan Province. While each site has its own unique set of elements, all of these are located within developing countries, a key factor that has an impact on how they are managed.The archaeological research that has been generated and continues to be carried out in these four sites as well as the efforts to manage other aspects such as protection, presentation and dissemination of information, interpretation and creation of value for the public, involvement and engagement of the locals will also be examined.

Biographical information

Caroline Marie Quinto (Mylene) Lising specialises in heritage studies and applications with a focus on Southeast Asia, human origins and Palaeolithic archaeology. She is a Cultural Deputy Officer at the National Museum of the Philippines and a lecturer in Sociology and Anthropology at Ateneo de Manila University. She recently received a grant from the Gerda Henkel Foundation (Germany) to build the Rizal Town Library, Kalinga, Philippines. Mylene holds an Erasmus Mundus International Master in Quaternary Science and Prehistory from the Muséum National d’histoire Naturelle, Paris, France. She is currently a PhD student at Goethe University in Frankfurt and a guest researcher at the ROCEEH (The Role of Culture in the Expansion of Early Humans) program at the Senckenberg Research Institution.

16:00 - SEMINAR - Exploring Sea Country through high-resolution 3D seismic imaging of Australia�s NW Shelf: resolving early coastal landscapes and preservation of underwater cultural heritage More Information
Abstract

Almost 2 million square km of Australia’s continental shelf was flooded following the termination of the last glacial maximum, and with it the cultural heritage of the first arrival and coastal occupation of Australia beginning some 65,000 years ago. In order to prospect for this missing cultural record, we must first identify submerged coastal landscapes and landforms which likely provided favourable environments for occupation and potential settlement by aboriginal groups. However due to the sheer size of the Australian continental margin, it has proven challenging to locate and identify prospective submerged cultural sites. In order to improve the chances of success, we take a novel approach using industry 3D seismic datasets, which cover vast areas of Australia’s continental shelf, to map seafloor bathymetry at high resolution (10 to 25 m). Our study focuses on the mid/outer shelf regions proximal to Barrow Island where there is evidence of Aboriginal occupation as far back as 50,000 years BP. The 3D seismic bathymetry, which covers an area of 6,500 square km, revealed a highly complex and geomorphically mature coastal landscape preserved at depths of −70 to −75 m, including coastal barrier dunes, lagoonal systems, tidal flats and estuarine channels, each are highly productive and understood as preferred habitation sites for Aboriginal groups. Based on the seabed depth of the submerged shorelines and reconstructed sea level curves we determine that these coastal landforms likely formed during a sustained interval of stable sea level spanning Marine Isotope Stage 3 (57 to 29 ka).

Biographical information

Dr Michael O’Leary is Senior Lecturer in Climate Geoscience at the School of Earth Sciences, UWA, with research expertise in the fields of tropical coastal geomorphology, coral reef and reef-island evolution, and climate change. His research focuses on (1) sea level reconstructions during periods of known climate instability, a metric that speaks directly to the stability of the Polar ice sheets, and (2) tropical coastal response, in particular, low reef-island response to future sea level rise. He is currently undertaking investigations into the Quaternary evolution of the NW Shelf, and in particular, reconstructing the physical and cultural environments that relate to the shelf's remnant submerged landscapes.
Friday 25
14:30 - SEMINAR - Anthropology & Sociology Seminar Series 2019 More Information
Title: The Power of Shared Heritage: China’s Belt Road Initiative and the Politics of Silk Road Heritage

Presenter: Erin Linn

In 2013, China formally announced the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a multinational global development, infrastructure, and investment initiative involving more than 70 countries. As part of its multi-pronged strategy, China is using a number of mechanisms to realise the goals of BRI: infrastructure development, economic and business investments, diplomacy, political negotiations, culture, and cultural heritage. To gain public support for the initiative China is promoting “people-to people bonds”, one of five strategic “cooperation priorities” of the Belt and Road Initiative (NDRC, 2015). Cultural heritage is identified as a key tool by which to foster “people-to-people bonds”. To date, research has primarily focused on the political, economic, and policy implications of BRI in an attempt to understand the motivating factors behind this grand strategy. Few scholars have considered the cultural implications of BRI and how China’s explicit use of cultural heritage may impact the people living in areas most affected by Belt and Road projects. Belt and Road Initiative represents a complex web of institutions, networks of connectivity, and identities spanning vast geographic distances. Through public discourse the BRI is being framed as a revitalization of the ancient Silk Roads. China is both creating and promoting a notion of shared heritage using imagery, history, and heritage of the ancient Silk Roads. This notion of shared heritage is framed around conceptualisations of inter/intra-regional heritage rooted in ideas of an ancient trade network based on peaceful and prosperous cross-cultural exchange between nations. In creating this conception of shared heritage, the heritage of nation states, and ethnic and religious groups are circumvented, the significance of national borders lessens, and new identities are forged. This PhD seeks to understand if notions of shared heritage exist in the context of the lived experiences of communities in countries impacted by BRI, outside of official discourse. The research contributes to the emerging field of shared heritage by developing a conceptual framework of shared heritage drawing on theories of cosmopolitanism. Using this framework China’s use of trans-regional heritage is interrogated to identify how notions of shared heritage are being created and promoted. Oriented by a qualitative methodology and place-based studies, the thesis explores if and how these ideas are manifesting within institutions, policies, and local communities in Central Asia. Fieldwork in Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan will be conducted to investigate how these complex ideas of shared heritage are being received, understood, and/or affecting individuals impacted by BRI.

Bio: Erin is a PhD candidate at UWA researching China’s use of cultural heritage within the context of the Belt Road Initiative. Her work explores the emerging concept of shared heritage and how China is creating and operationalizing notions of a shared heritage of the ancient Silk Roads as a key strategy of the BRI. She is interested in understanding how these complex ideas of shared heritage are being received, understood, and/or affecting the lived experiences of individuals and communities impacted by BRI. Erin’s research is informed by 15 years of work in cultural heritage and archaeology in Southeast Asia, Jordan, Israel, Italy, Australia, the US, and the United Kingdom. She holds an MA in Archaeology from the University College London and an MA in Cultural Heritage from Deakin University and is the founder and director of the non-profit organization, Integrated Heritage Project.

Title: Spark-ling New Social Relations. Social Network Analysis and Design-Based Research in practice

Presenter: Lukasz Krzyzowski

Technological innovation in health care can have a positive impact on seniors’ independence at home, enhance their wellbeing, and maintain social networks. While in many cases end-users’ perspectives are included in the process of technology development, this presentation provides a case study for a relation-centred approach combined with the Living Lab model. The Spark Living Lab was a creative environment where project partners and end-users were actively involved in co-designing, prototyping, and testing a mobile application through participation in social network research, a series of design thinking workshops, usability tests, and use of the app ‘in practice’ in the community, enabling the project’s outcomes to be measured and scaled up.

Bio: Dr Lukasz Krzyzowski is Manager of the UWA Social Care and Social Ageing Living Lab (UWA School of Social Sciences) and Assistant Professor at AGH University of Science and Technology in Krakow. Lukasz is a certified project evaluator, Design Thinking facilitator, user-centred service and product designer with aged care, and community engagement expertise. Lukasz previously worked on European Commission funded projects including “ICT for Ageing Well”, and recently on “Smartcare: Social Rechnology, Aged Care, and Transnational Connections”. Lukasz currently collaborates with Befriend Inc. to co-design digital services for people with disability in WA.

 November 2019
Friday 01
11:00 - SEMINAR - Asian Studies Research Seminar 2019 : Understanding School-Family Relationships and their Contribution to Children’s Religious Identity Formation in Indonesia More Information
Indonesia has been built on the pluralism principle, as enshrined in its state ideology, Pancasila. However, tension over the relationship between religion and the state has always existed. Contemporary Indonesia is marked by inter-religious conflicts, religious intolerance and the increasing discrimination against religious minorities. Education potentially could be used to promote religious tolerance in a diverse society. In the education system, religious identity formation is foregrounded in specific areas such as curriculum and in broader activities designed to create school culture. Given the centrality of religion in Indonesian culture and schooling, there is a need to better understand the religious life sphere, the possibilities for peaceful religious coexistence, and how children’s religious identities are formed. This presentation provides an outline of a proposed doctoral study that aims to explore school-family relationships and their role in shaping children’s religious identities. It is important to research these relationships for two main reasons. First, religious identity is poorly understood and is only now appearing as a sub-field within identity studies. Research about children’s religious identity is lacking globally especially in the Indonesian context. Second, while there is a large amount of work on parental involvement in schools globally, this is not the case in Indonesia, where there is a major need for further research. Data gathered will be based on six months of ethnographic fieldwork with teachers, parents, school principals, and children in two primary schools in Indonesia, and will employ participant observation, focus groups, in-depth interviews, and photo-elicitation interviews.

14:30 - SEMINAR - Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series : The governing parent-citizen: School governance, policy reform and divisions of parent labour More Information
Internationally, major policy reforms seek to deepen parent and community engagement in schools. Yet whilst pervasive in policy documents, discourses surrounding ‘parent engagement’ are elastic and imprecise, ultimately gaining meaning through the technologies of governance that emerge when policies are enacted in schools. In this paper, we examine how one major reform movement in Australia is articulating new roles for parents and community members in schools: the 'Independent Public Schools' initiative in Western Australia. We argue that this reform is constructing a new ‘governing parent-citizen’, through which the parental labour of social reproduction is being extended and rearticulated. Our analysis demonstrates the intensive policy intervention required to produce this new form of parental labour and the subsequent divisions of labour it is producing.

Dr Glenn Savage is an Associate Professor in the School of Social Sciences at the University of Western Australia. His research is located at the intersection of public policy and sociology, with specific expertise in schooling reform, federalism and the politics of education policy. He has recently completed an Australian Research Council 'Discovery Early Career Researcher Award' project titled 'National schooling reform and the reshaping of Australian federalism'.

Jessica Gerrard is a Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne. She is an interdisciplinary researcher who works with sociological and historical methods and policy analysis to address issues of inequity in education. Her research focuses on the relationship of education to social change and politics in the context of transforming school and work contexts

Thursday 07
18:00 - SEMINAR - Centre for Muslim States and Societies Seminar Series 2019 : FOOD for THOUGHT- Event Canceled More Information
CMSS invites you to its new dinner meeting talks on Muslim societies. The talks are followed by dinner with a dish from the country a given talk is about. The first talk, in partnership with Africa Research and Engagement Centre (AfREC), UWA, is on Western Africa, by UWA analyst Muhammad Suleiman. Western Africa is the heartland of Islam in Sub-Saharan Africa, a dynamic and diverse region undergoing rapid development and reforms in governance. With increasing research and policy attention focused on this crucial sub-region, this lecture offers FOOD for THOUGHT on the following questions: 1. What is the history of religion-based violence in the sub-region? 2. What are the real costs of recent developments in Western Africa to extant nation-building efforts, including for pre-existing social dynamics and conflicts? 3. What does the situation mean for foreign investment in the sub-region, such as in the resources industry? 4. What are appropriate and effective policy responses by key stakeholders and interested actors?

Muhammad Dan Suleiman recently completed a PhD in Political Science and International Relations at UWA where his thesis deconstructed Islamist movements and state-society relations in Western Africa from decolonial and pan African lenses. He is also an analyst for several think tanks and teaches units at UWA on the international politics of Africa, peace and security in Africa, and Islam in the world.

TICKETS: (Standard $50; Students $35) via Eventbrite https://www.eventbrite.com.au/e/food-for-thought-lecture-on-western-africa-tickets-78565699121
Thursday 14
15:00 - SEMINAR - Centre for Muslim States and Societies Seminar Series 2019 : The Islamic Republic of Mauritania: yesterday, today and tomorrow More Information
Mauritania stands at the crossroads of modernity, with deep potential tensions between different groups (“white” Maures, “black” Afro-Mauritanians, and “Haratin”), threatening the country’s socio-political stability.

Recent discoveries of world-class hydrocarbon reservoirs offshore southern Mauritania, an area principally peopled by Afro-Mauritanians, further adds to these tensions. This could cause an uprising of a merged portion of the black African population against Maure dominance, with a potential balkanisation of the country in a similar scenario to that of the former Sudan.

This seminar explores these tensions and explains their roots. It will also propose potential remedies that can be formulated as public policies and joint government- industry actions to counteract potential instability.

Profile: Max is a graduate geologist (UNSW, 1975) with 44 years of international experience and has been instrumental in finding and championing the evaluation of significant hydrocarbon and mineral discoveries, most especially in Africa and the Near-East.

He is an “Officer of the National Order of Merit for the Islamic Republic of Mauritania”. This is the second such award given to a foreigner by the Mauritanian Government, the first being to the French President Charles de Gaulle. He was the Honorary Consul for the Republic of Mali in Perth between 2005 and 2016.

Max has a Graduate Diploma in Business (1988), a Masters in International Relations (2010), and a Doctorate in International Affairs awarded with Chancellor’s recommendations in 2015.

Max presently heads African Geopolitics, a socio-political advisory group that assists African governments and foreign companies in the natural resources industries to work together on the African continent. Entry for this event is free. Please register your interest through [email protected]
Friday 15
14:30 - SEMINAR - Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series : Relationships in the Making: Negotiating knowledge through documentation. More Information
Museums these days work hard to document their collections through field research, and all anthropologists are deeply involved in the everyday negotiation of their presence in different fieldwork contexts. Part of what underlies such negotiations is a principled reliance on conventional Enlightenment conceptions of knowledge. Assumptions built into this mode of making knowledge result in a perfectly rational process in which appropriation, and recontextualisation seem obvious and natural: realising the value of (data) collection by preserving and analyzing it in a reified space. However, such spaces are often claimed to be inaccessible or inutile to the people about whom they claim to know. Documentation may thus also be read as an artefact of persistent inequalities that lie behind data gathering or collecting, epitomized by the imposition of knowledge forms. While some historical collectors and many contemporary scholars work beyond the implications of this frame, it remains a formative problematic. Taking account of the diagnosis, the talk will draw on an experiment, undertaken with Reite villagers on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, to make documentation ‘responsive’ to a different problematic: that of retaining the ‘relationality’ of knowledge. In doing so, we will explore one strategy to make documentation itself a process and a relationship, responsive to an ethics of mutual, but differentiated, value creation. Drawing upon the Melanesian practice of ‘knowledge as relationship’ is one possible way to make the process of documentation responsive to the relationships it constitutes.

James Leach is a Social Anthropologist with research interests in creativity, intellectual property, knowledge production, digital technologies, and ecological relations to place. His primary fieldsite is in Papua New Guinea, and has also undertaken fieldwork in the UK, Europe, and Australia with Contemporary dance companies, interdisciplinary collaborators, and software engineers. Some of his recent works include Dance Becoming Knowledge (with Scott deLahunta), Leonardo; The death of a drum: objects, persons, and changing social form on the Rai Coast of Papua New Guinea, Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute; ‘Foreword’: Ownership and Nurture Studies in Native Amazonian Property Relations, eds. Brightman, Faust, and Grotti; Leaving the Magic Out. Knowledge and effect in different places. Anthropological Forum. He works for CREDO, Université d'Aix-Marseille, France, and is an adjunct in Anthropology and Sociology at UWA.
Thursday 21
15:00 - EVENT - Centre for Muslim States and Societies Seminar Series 2019 : Financial inclusion: Women-focused Islamic banking in Kenya More Information
Development theories see inclusion and access to finance as a critical factor in overcoming persistent income inequality and slower growth in economies. Well-functioning financial systems are not only significant for channelling funds to the most productive uses and help to boost economies, but also for improving opportunities and reducing poverty. As the importance of a healthy financial system continues to be focusedon globally, development practice progressively recognises the ethical and religious suitability of financial systems.

Islamic finance is thus fast becoming a significant commercial sector in many countries including Kenya that seeks to service not only its Muslim population, but also offers ethical banking to non-Muslim clients. With a focus on Islamic finance and banking in Kenya, this presentation examines the prospects for financial inclusion of women through Islamic women-focused banking.

The presentation is based on research done on Islamic banks in Kenya.

FREE entry but RSVP: [email protected]

All welcome to attend.
Friday 22
11:00 - SEMINAR - Linguistics Seminar Series 2019 : Yarnin’ the blackfella way: Quotation in urban Aboriginal English More Information
Metropolitan cities around the world have increasingly become global. Linguistically, this trend is linked to the ingress of linguistic variants readily taken up by metropolitan youth (Cukor-Avila, 2012). Quotative be like is one such variant and the quotative system of English worldwide has changed drastically since its inception. Tagliamonte, D’Arcy &Rodríguez Louro (2016) document overwhelming parallelism in how quotation is deployed across English varieties. Are Aboriginal English speakers participating in global linguistic change? If so, what is the trajectory of this change? We ask these questions not to measure Aboriginal English against a ‘standard English’ canon (cf. Dickson, Forthcoming) but to interrogate how linguistic change across distinct social groups may be seen as indicative of social cohesion (or lack thereof).

Our data stem from the DECRA Corpus of Aboriginal English (Rodríguez Louro, 2018-2021) currently consisting of over 50 hours of talk-in-interaction data stemming from the speech of 70 speakers aged 11-88 who reside in urbanised Nyungar country. We circumscribe the envelope of variation functionally to include all uses of direct quotation, internal thought and non-lexicalised sounds and gestures (example 1). We use linear mixed-effects logistic regression. Our preliminary results show highly constrained discourse-pragmatic variation with marked generational differences. The suite of quotative verbs in the Aboriginal English sample shows a variability of forms unattested in white Australia (where the bulk of the variation is represented by say amongst the pre-1960s-born and by be like amongst millennials and Generation Zs). Additionally, tense and grammatical person operate differently in Aboriginal English where the historical present is not lexically conditioned and first person plural subjects play a prominent role.

(1) So I come running out of the room. […]. I said, ‘Don’t open the door. Now she knows we’re home’. Then ah, well, she goes, ‘Oh, it’s okay’. I said, ‘You deal with her then, you deal with her’, because she thought she knew. […]. She opens the door now. She says, ‘Oh, come inside. Do you need any help?’ I said to her, ‘I’m warning you, don’t take that meat off her’ because she had a trolley, a pram with no baby in there, a pram full of meat. Then she comes pushing it in. She’s like, ‘Hi darling, how you going? Thanks for letting me in your house’, and pushes the white girl and says ‘Get out of my way’ and walks in the kitchen. She’s like ‘I’m making a feed, I don’t care’. I walked out. She reckoned, ‘See, that’s my niece there. She’s black. I’m allowed in this house.’ (Female/18/2001) Our findings support Malcolm’s (2018: 23) claims that the difference between Aboriginal and mainstream Australian English is emblematic of a lack of integration between Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal speech communities which have ‘maintained a largely parallel existence in Australian society’. They also align with Wolfram & Schilling-Estes’s (2006: 229) finding that most African Americans ‘do not participate in major dialect changes’ attested in European American communities in the USA. In sum, the disparities between the quotative systems of Aboriginal English and Anglo-Celtic Australian English are the linguistic reflex of the social chasm between black and white Australia.

Celeste Rodriguez Louro is a Senior Lecturer in Linguistics and an Australian Research Council DECRA Fellow at UWA. Trained in Argentina, the USA and Australia, Celeste is interested in the linguistic and social factors shaping language usage and in how this usage ultimately contributes to language evolution. Her current DECRA fellowship is allowing her to document sociolinguistic variation in cross-generational Aboriginal English, in collaboration with Glenys Collard.

Glenys Collard is an Executive Member at Mallee Aboriginal Corporation and an Honorary Research Fellow at UWA. A South West Nyungar woman and matriarch within her nuclear family of over 300 people, Glenys has experience working in government and non-government agencies including providing training on Aboriginal English. In the public sector, contributes significantly to developments related to policy and planning. She has also co-authored numerous educational and academic papers.
Saturday 23
8:30 - PUBLIC TALK - AfREC WA African Women�s Open Forum on Conflict Resolution : An public engagement session in the WA African Women’s Leadership, Empowerment & Development (A-LEAD) Program 2019-20, co-convened by the Organisation of African Communities in WA and UWA AfREC. More Information
“Together We Influence and Empower One Another”

Come along and engage with expert and high-profile speakers and community leaders as we address the issues, causes and remedies of conflicts in various places including the workplace, social setting and in the community. The session will focus on such areas as identification of potential conflict, skills needed to deal with conflict within the law, resolving conflict legally and consequences of resolving conflict outside the law and you will have an opportunity share ideas and experiences and raise any other areas you feel are relevant to your situation.

The WA African Women's Leadership, Empowerment & Development (A-LEAD) Program is a joint project between OACWA and the University of Western Australia’s (UWA) Africa Research & Engagement Centre (AfREC). A-LEAD seeks to develop and enhance African-Australian women’s leadership and networking skills,and builds leadership capacity in ways that will have a positive impact in African communities and wider Western Australian society.
Thursday 28
17:00 - SEMINAR - Centre for Muslim States and Societies Seminar Series 2019- Event Cancelled : Islamic Revivalism and Politics in Malaysia: Problems in Nation Building More Information
In this lecture, Dr Bob Olivier explains the Islamisation process that has unfolded in Malaysia over the last fifty years. Based on his forthcoming book published by Palgrave Macmillan, Dr Olivier will present the findings from in-depth interviews with 100 of Malaysia’s “educated classes”, or “elite”, regarding their reactions to the changes that have accompanied Islamisation in the country, and how they feel it has impacted on them. The seminar will also shed light on the impacts the change in government in May 2019 is likely to have.

The lecture will be followed by light refreshments.

Profile highlights: • 24 years PA Consulting Group, in Australia, Hong Kong and Malaysia, last position Head of South-East Asia Region. • 25 years Founder and Chairman of ASPAC Executive Search, one of Malaysia’s leading search firms. • 21 years as a Director of the British Malaysian Chamber of Commerce. • Currently a Member of the Senate of the University of Western Australia. • Currently an Adviser to the Centre for Muslim States and Societies.

FREE ENTRY BUT RSVP: [email protected]

All welcome to attend.

18:00 - PUBLIC TALK - Anthropology and Sociology Seminar Series : The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin More Information
Over his eight years as president of Uganda, Idi Amin was the subject of hundreds of thousands of photographs. A team of photographers under the Ministry of Information followed Amin around, taking pictures of the many occasions when he appeared before the public. For decades it was thought that the photographs taken by the men of the Ministry had been lost.

However, in 2015, Richard Vokes, working with Winston Agaba and Malachi Kabaale at the Uganda Broadcasting Corporation in Kampala, uncovered a filing cabinet with over 70,000 of their photographic negatives. In 2018, UBC in partnership with Derek Peterson of the University of Michigan, and UWA, launched a project to digitize the archive. The first major exhibition of these images is now showing at the Uganda Museum.

In this lecture, Richard Vokes will narrate the social biography of the archive, and explore what it reveals about Idi Amin the man, about the nature of his regime, and about everyday life in Amin’s Uganda. It will argue that although the archive has provided extraordinary new insights into the Amin years, so too its discovery and exhibition have raised complicated questions regarding the politics of memory in post-colonial Uganda. The lecture will describe how the project team have sought to engage with public discussions on this subject, in partnership with our many Ugandan collaborators – who include survivors of Amin’s torture chambers, and the relatives of his 300,000 victims.

About the Speaker

Richard Vokes is Associate Professor in Anthropology at UWA. His research focuses primarily on Uganda, where he has been conducting ethnographic fieldwork since 2000. He has published extensively, including on the history of photography, media and social change. His books include: Ghosts of Kanungu (2009); Routes and Traces: Anthropology, Photography and the Archive (with Marcus Banks, 2010); Photography in Africa (2012); Media and Development (2018) and; The Unseen Archive of Idi Amin (with Derek Peterson, forthcoming 2020).

Free event! RSVP: online via www.ias.uwa.edu.au/lectures/vokes
Friday 29
11:00 - EVENT - Linguistics Seminar Series 2019 : Does a Mixed Language always have only two souce languages? More Information
It is conventionally thought that one of the distinguishing characteristics of a mixed language is that this type of language is derived from a combination of only two source languages. Other distinguishing features include the ways in which the source language components are distributed in the mixed language, showing significant amounts of lexicon and grammar from each source. The Australian mixed language, Light Warlpiri, shows clear evidence of contributions from three languages – Warlpiri, Kriol and English – in different areas of the grammar, thereby questioning the assumption of only two source languages. Drawing on work on the verbal auxiliary system, the reciprocal and reflexive systems and the realisation of fricatives in Light Warlpiri, I will show how each of the source languages contributes. I conclude that although Light Warlpiri is a mixed language, it combines material from three sources, in different parts of the grammar. This may drive us to revisit the definition of a mixed language, looking more at how source language material is distributed, rather than at the number of sources.

Short bio

Carmel O’Shannessy is a Senior Lecturer in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University. Her research is in language contact and acquisition, including the emergence of Light Warlpiri, a new Australian mixed language, and children’s development of Light Warlpiri and Warlpiri. She has been involved with languages and education in remote Indigenous communities in Australia since 1996, in the areas of bilingual education and her current research.

12:00 - SEMINAR - Linguistics Seminar Series 2019 : How to Take a Complement in the Eastern Caribbeans? More Information
In early creole studies, variation in the form of the complementiser was taken as a diagnostic of a speaker’s position on the (post-)creole continuum (e.g. Bickerton 1971; Washabaugh 1977). With the exception of relative clause markers, complementisers have received little attention since then (cf. Winford 2008; Velupillai 2015), possibly because of their low salience as well as the need for large corpora of natural speech to study their patterns of variation.

This paper uses a corpus of English(-based creole) consisting of sociolinguistic interviews recorded between 2003 and 2005 in Bequia (St Vincent and the Grenadines) to analyse the choice of complementiser choice in three contexts: finite (1) and non-finite verbal complements (2) and relative clauses (3).

(1) a. I believe Ø they born here. (PF24/00:41) b. I have to believe that they say so, but I don’t know. (MP2/18:16) (2) a. You only want to see her when it is dark. (LP28/7:37) b. Yeah, who want for go there, who got money for go to them. (H11/46:01) c. Sometime I want Ø go night church. (H8/2:45) (3) a. You’ll have lots of people that still go to church. (MP103/53:45) b. If you have children who are not mature enough … (LP28/11:53) c. There’s some girls Ø still does go. (H5/27:46)

From interviews with 26 speakers from four villages of different ethnic compositions and socioeconomic histories, 9,616 complementiser tokens were exhaustively extracted and coded for a range of social and linguistic factors.

Principal components analysis of variant distribution allows us to characterize each speaker according to three underlying factors: zeroes (1a, 2c, 3c), that or wh-forms (1b, 3a, b) and for (2b). Although speakers from particular villages tend to cluster together in their use of variants, there are several outliers and some overlap between villages. We provide some preliminary analysis of the distribution of complementiser variants according to linguistic context and function. The results of these analyses suggest that complementation is a means of differentiation between villages in Bequia, but in contrast to early creole studies, speakers do not fit neatly onto a linear continuum.



References Bickerton, D. 1971. Inherent variability and variable rules. Foundations of Language 7:457-92. Velupillai, V. 2015. Pidgins, creoles & mixed languages. Amsterdam: Benjamins. Washabaugh, W. 1977. Constraining variation in decreolization. Language 53:329-52. Winford, D. 2008. Atlantic creole syntax. In S. Kouwenberg & J.V. Singler (eds.), Handbook of pidgin and creole studies. Oxford: Blackwell, 19-47.

Short bio James Walker has been Professor of Language Diversity at La Trobe University since 2017. He received a BA in Linguistics (1989) and an MA in Anthropology (1991) from the University of Toronto and an MA (1995) and PhD (2000) in Linguistics from the University of Ottawa. From 2000 to 2017 he held various positions at York University (Toronto), including Professor of Linguistics. He is an international expert in the study of sociolinguistic variation and change and has conducted studies of phonetics/phonology, morphology and syntax in varieties of English spoken in the United States, Canada and the Caribbean, as well as research on Sango (Central African Republic), Swedish and Brazilian Portuguese. He is the author of Variation in Linguistic Systems (2010, Routledge), Canadian English: A Sociolinguistic Perspective (2015, Routledge) and (with Miriam Meyerhoff) Bequia Talk (2013, Battlebridge) and the editor of Aspect in Grammatical Variation (2010, Benjamins).


 December 2019
Tuesday 03
18:00 - PUBLIC LECTURE - Bazm-e-Sarfraz Annual Public Lecture : Muslim Youth in America More Information
The Centre for Muslim States and Societies invites you to Bazm-e-Sarfraz annual event commemorating the contributions made by Begum Sarfraz Iqbal (1939-2003) towards promoting Urdu literature and championing the cause of inter-communal harmony.

At this year’s event, Dr Ghazala Hayat, daughter of Begum Sarfraz Iqbal, will speak on her experiences in the United States working with Muslim youth and on the issue of radicalisation.

The lecture will be followed by supper.

About the speaker

Professor Ghazala Hayat, daughter of Begum Sarfraz Iqbal, is Chair of Public Relations for the Islamic Foundation of Greater St. Louis and a past board president of Interfaith Partnership. She is also Professor of Neurology at the Saint Louis University School of Medicine. Among various leadership positions, she is director of the Clinical Neurophysiology fellowship and she is also director of the ALS clinic.

About Begum Sarfraz Iqbal

Born in Rohtak, India, Begum Sarfraz Iqbal migrated to Pakistan at a young age and became a patron of Urdu literature and art in Pakistan. She authored two books: Daman-e-Yusuf (Mavara Publishers, 1989) and Jo Bachay Hain Sang (Naqoosh, 2002) and wrote regular columns in Daily Ausaf (Islamabad) and Daily Pakistan. She also published numerous articles in other literary magazines including Mah-e-Nau.

Begum Sarfraz Iqbal was a philanthropist who introduced the idea of adopting schools to improve the quality of education in Pakistan and ceaselessly worked to help disadvantaged people in Pakistan. The events commemorating her contributions focus on ideas that unite people across religious and cultural divides and focus attention on ideas and philosophies of moderate Muslim thinkers.

 February 2020
Thursday 13
9:00 - CONFERENCE - The Fifth AP-PPN Annual Conference : Faculty of Arts, Business, Law and Education will be hosting The Fifth AP-PPN Annual Conference Website | More Information
Conference theme: Research, Evidence, and Public Policy in Asia-Pacific. The conference theme encourages papers that examine the changing dynamics of research, evidence and public policy. Call for papers and panels Proposals for both individual papers and thematic panels on all topics relevant to public policy are invited. Please refer to website for full particulars.
Friday 14
12:30 - SEMINAR - A preliminary typology of Australian interjections:results and methodological insights More Information
In this seminar I will present a preliminary typology of the interjections documented in 37 languages of diverse genetic affiliation across the Australian continent. I will spell out the results concerning Australian interjections themselves, which for most of them raise the question of whether they reflect specifically Australian properties, or universals of language. I will also discuss theoretical and methodological issues involved in studying interjections typologically.
Friday 28
11:00 - SEMINAR - Hearing the Voice of Chinese International Students at the National Library of Australia More Information
As a recipient of the prestigious Asian Studies Grant, Dr Tao spent four weeks at the National Library of Australia in January 2020, when he was able to explore and investigate into the memoirs published by Chinese international students who studied in Australia since the 1980s. In this talk, Dr Tao will report the preliminary findings of his research residency. According to these findings, the study environment for Chinese international students in Australia changed significantly in the last four decades as a result of the rapid process of globalisation and the advance of telecommunication technologies. However, the key factors that impact the experience of Chinese international students in Australia remain persistent, including the challenges of establishing cross-cultural friendships and the importance of mono-cultural support networks. Dr Tao will also reflect on his experience of working on NLA’s Australiana Collection in the Chinese Language, which is a globally unique resource for researchers and readers who care particularly about how Australia is perceived and presented in the Chinese-language publications.

12:30 - SEMINAR - Embedding variationist perspectives in undergraduate linguistics teaching More Information
Abstract

When I began my PhD research on complex language repertoires, I found my linguistic toolkit was pretty empty of the kinds of analytic approaches that would allow me to do justice to the linguistic dexterity of my participants. This is partly down to the luck of the draw; I had studied my undergraduate linguistics degree at time prior to the upsurge in interest in variationist sociolinguistics in Australia and so no such courses were on offer at my alma mater. But as I embarked on the process of upskilling and methodological innovation that my PhD demanded of me, I also felt at times I was ‘unlearning’ some of the ways of thinking about language that had been engrained during my bachelor studies. In this talk, I reflect on the concept of linguistic variation (and the linguistic variable) and explore how this is navigated in a typical undergraduate linguistics program. In particular, I focus on opportunities for embedding the concept of variable grammar ‘early and often’ as a way to undermine linguistic prejudice and equip the linguists of the future to grapple with some of the big divisions in our field, such as between probabilistic, usage-based accounts and formal theories of language.

Short bio

My research and applied work is focused at the intersection of descriptive linguistics, sociolinguistics and education. I have always been interested in linguistic outcomes of contact, such as individual multilingualism, language practises in border regions, and contact varieties. I joined the Aboriginal Child Language Acquisition project in 2011, undertaking a study of Alyawarr children’s use of two closely-related language varieties in central Australia. Prior to this, I worked for several years at Wangka Maya Pilbara Aboriginal Language Centre as a field linguist and I also spent a year in the Philippines working for a local Indigenous people’s education NGO, where I developed multilingual curricula and teaching materials. Before coming to UNE in 2019, I lived in Germany for 3.5 years, teaching linguistics in the English Studies departments of the Friedrich Schiller University (Jena) and Erfurt University (Erfurt).

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